CAA 2014, Paris

I just returned from this year’s Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods (CAA) conference, which was held in Paris last week. Overall, the conference was a great success, despite a number of teething troubles (particularly with IT support [ironically?]).

I spoke on the Friday morning about using Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle as a metaphor for good cartographic practice. I’ll try to write more about that at a later time.

One particularly impressive visualization of data that I saw was Lost Change, which maps PAS coins and their mint locations. Another very interesting paper I heard was about MicroPasts (another British Museum backed venture), which is designed to allow archaeologists to access crowdsourced labour and crowdfunded funding. I also enjoyed Philip Verhagen’s paper, as his project is encountering many of the same data rationalization issues as our own (and he only has to work with a single source database, rather than the 70+ that we are trying to combine).